MANIFESTO CANNIBALE

Manifesto Cannibale is a strange organism. 
It was born old. It was reincarnated many times and in many bodies.
It mutated into other forms. It proliferated luxuriantly. It was infected and devoured. It was orphaned and so, it grew.
It starts from a reflection on the world of plants as an emblem of a fundamental difference, an unsolvable otherness which calls on us to reconsider the place of the human kind, the fabric of time, the forms of perception and the nature of thought.
The vegetal dimension is encrypted under the skin of the inhabitants of the scene through a shifting of parameters, a radical and silent sliding of the point of view, an anthropocentrism’s out-of-focus, a gentle distortion of the contemplative pact that moves the fruition a few diopter away.
Its creation was abandoned by the author, Francesca Pennini, who kept herself in a condition of “blindness“ and distance from the creation, communicating with the performers only through poetic clues.
A ghost author who signs something she does not know nor see, who lives on the edge of the scene under a sheet and who is only allowed to see what is absolutely still.
This Manifesto is a self-boycott, a dangerous offer, a seismic phenomenon of vision that becomes a political confession of the present time by questioning our presence both in the earth’s ecosystem and in the theater’s.
The cycle of Lieder "Winterreise" by Franz Schubert (performed live on piano and magnetic tape) accompanies a perceptive rite of transformation towards conditions that cannot be experienced by human bodies, between microscopic dances, dangerous games and choreographic hieroglyphs.
On stage the fundamental dichotomies vibrate, the hierarchies between dark and light, sound and silence, black and white, naked and clothed, awake and asleep, stillness and motion are disassembled.
Sound speaks through light while darkness becomes a precious space for hallucination and digestion.
The volume of silence rises.
In this gentle attack on the genome of the stage, the key roles of the theater are mixed up in the continuous incorporation of other people's matter.
To be eaten.
The meaning of cannibalism is right here: the greatest heresy - eating one's own kind - becomes an inevitable constant.
But, if this otherness goes into crisis, if I recognize that the other is always in me and that I am always part of the other, then any act - from breathing to sex, from eating to the very act of seeing - is cannibalistic.
And, again, who is the other in the theater – this temporary planet we draw in the hall?
Perhaps the other is the spectator.
The spectator is the foreigner who becomes a forest in contemplation and whose silent activity is the fundamental action.
Two species separated by the proscenium.
Crossing, once again and with a new step, the border between stage and audience.
And from that mouth to be swallowed up with all the genetic power of an idea and a touch.
Being in front of the body of the Other, this is what theater is.
We are all cannibals.